Chinatown Los Angeles

Financial woes have derailed the development of Chinatown Blossom Plaza, a long-awaited $162-million apartment and retail complex set to rise on the former site of one of Los Angeles' most beloved downtown eateries. The developer of the project, which was to replace the shuttered Little Joe's restaurant in Chinatown, on Thursday filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code to prevent its lender from foreclosing on the property at Broadway and College Street.

There were too many cooks in the narrow kitchen aisle in Chinatown's Grand Star Jazz Club on Saturday, but they cheerily squeezed past one another to peer into the braising pot where chunks of pork shoulder simmered in a piquant sauce of red wine, rice wine, garlic, scallions and ginger. In front of an industrial-size wok, Jet Tila, a restaurant consultant and radio and television chef, demonstrated how to steam whole striped bass.

To step into the Gin Herb store -- or Wing On Tong, as it is known to its Cantonese-speaking patrons -- is to enter both another country and another century. Behind a long counter fronting a wall of wooden drawers, fourth-generation herbalists in the family-owned store measure and mix leaves and roots, mushrooms and minerals, perfuming the air with the aroma of musty ginseng and sweet licorice.

It is a classic art-world story: A small band of young, hip, energetic dealers descends upon a forgotten corner of the city in search of reasonable real estate. They slip in between Chinese restaurants with pictures of lobsters propped up in the windows and dusty souvenir shops 10 years past their prime, refitting crumbling interiors with gleaming white walls and making uneasy peace with wary shopkeepers.

Angela Chao Roberson, 22, knew she did not exactly look Chinese, with her cocoa-colored skin, her bushels of curly hair and her curvy figure. But she had no doubt she belonged in the same room with 17 other young women vying for the title Miss Los Angeles Chinatown. Sure, she ate soul food when her father's African American relatives came to visit her family in Victorville, but her family was much more likely to eat rice and stir-fried tilapia with garlic and soy sauce.

Los Angeles police raided a hotel Thursday on the outskirts of Chinatown, arresting eight suspects in an alleged crack cocaine ring that provided a stark look at how even homeless people with only pennies to their name can fuel a burgeoning drug trade.

During the day, the faded red lanterns that crisscross Chung King Road in Chinatown dangle listlessly above a row of Chinese antique and trinket shops that have seen better times. But on a recent Saturday night, after the gates on the Chinese shops were pulled down, another Chinatown sprang to life near L.A.'s downtown. Modern art galleries that have filled Chinatown's storefronts in recent years opened, and the red lanterns were illuminated.

Design firms in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York have been named finalists in an unusual competition to develop a new state park at a former rail yard near downtown L.A. Mia Lehrer and Associates of Los Angeles, Hargreaves and Associates of San Francisco and Field Operations of New York beat out 30 other design teams in the first phase of the contest, state parks administrators said Thursday.